As one of the countermeasures against environmental problems in recent years, in particular global warming associated with air pollution and generation of carbon dioxide caused by gas emission of motor vehicles, fuel cell technologies which enable clean emission and highly energy-efficient driving have attracted attention. A fuel cell is formed of a membrane-electrode assembly including an electrolyte membrane, a pair of catalyst layers sandwiching the electrolyte membrane, and a pair of diffusion layers further sandwiching both outer surfaces of the catalyst layers, and a pair of fuel cell separators disposed on both outer surfaces of the membrane-electrode assembly.
Because the above-described elements forming a fuel cell are expensive, simulation technologies are being widely used for designing and manufacturing a fuel cell. (See Patent Documents 1 and 2, for example)
Particularly, with regard to a catalyst layer among the elements forming a fuel cell, effective use of simulation technologies is of great significance because a catalyst layer is an important element which determines properties of a fuel cell. However, if simulation is performed with the assumption that the structure of a catalyst layer is a “homogeneous porous medium” for the purpose of simplification of operation processing at the time of simulation and other purposes, actual properties and behaviors of a catalyst layer cannot be identified, which makes it difficult to predict the power generation performance of a fuel cell with high accuracy by means of the simulation.
Patent Document 1: JP 2005-135814 A
Patent Document 2: JP 2007-95620 A